Day 20 → Your views on drugs and alcohol

Alcohol has always been an escape for me. If I was hurting…I would drink to cover it up. If I was happy….I would drink to celebrate. If I was lonely…I would drink to black out and get through the night alone. If I was mad/sad/glad/bad/hated my dad/if I wanted to start a fad/sitting at my pad…I would drink. Drinking was my solution to all my problems. If I drank enough I forgot and didn’t deal with it. It covered up my inadequacies and made me funny/pretty/smart. It was my liquid courage. But I never thought I actually abused it. I never thought I was going overboard or hurting others. It took an intervention to show me that and I still didn’t see it really. I was angry so much the first year of sobriety. I hated everybody and everything. I was so angry about stupid things but I was in a place that didn’t understand that not drinking anymore just wasn’t enough. Being a few years sober, I see what I was doing and how I treated others because of it. I see how I did it to hide and I’ve tried to start dealing with things in a productive and healthy matter. I don’t always succeed but I try. Progress rather than perfection.



But alcohol and the “normal” drinker can mix. Having A glass of wine and even leaving some of it in the glass….that’s abusing the alcohol. I would ask people if they were going to finish that ½ jokingly but I just never understood people that could just stop with ½ a glass. That’s a foreign concept to me.



Drugs depend on the type. Illegal drugs I have never tried nor have any desire to. Drinking was enough for me to have alter my mental state. I was honestly scared of becoming addicted (which I see now as a joke since I’m an addict to alcohol.). And I was just not around it. I kept to myself and those people that I did hang out with didn’t do drugs. I just never felt it necessary to try. Now if I hadn’t stopped drinking, I probably would have ended up trying it because booze would stop getting me to the desired effect. But I don’t know that.



Legal drugs, to me, are necessary. I know that there are people that abuse legal drugs and I would say I was one of them. I had to change my sobriety date after 4 months of sobriety because I was taking some of the bipolar meds to get an effect. I was abusing them. Thank god my sponsor at the time confronted me about it because it would be going on still…3 years later. So I’m very careful about my meds. I take caution when I start a new med or change up the circumstances of when and where I take them. But I know I won’t live without these meds. That sounds uber dramatic but I know me and if I stopped taking these meds, I would end up in the hospital again and I don’t think it would be willingly or with all my faculties about me. I have a moral system now but when I go deep and dark…I don’t care about anyone or anything. I just want to stop.



Those that abuse legal drugs are just as bad as illegal drugs. They are taking them for the high and that is not the reason medicine is to be used. I’ve been watching Intervention lately (and so I’ve become an expert) and how quickly these people start lying, cheating, stealing…the bottom is when you stop digging but some people just don’t know how to stop. That is what 12 step programs are for. That is what interventions are for. To bring back the person that family and friends loved and want back. Some people just never stop and that’s heart breaking.